The Guggenheim has followed its virtually impossible-to-follow Maurizio Catellan installation with a powerful but more classically-bent John Chamberlain retrospective. The exhibit makes clear that while the building displays paintings functionally, it’s really a much, much better venue for sculpture. Surfaces have a hard time holding their own inside the extraordinarily plastic space but objects can compete on the same level. Almost perversely, the bigger, bolder and more egregious a sculpture, the more comfortably it sits within the museum.

Chamberlain’s pieces are beautifully scaled for the rotunda galleries, where one large freestanding work has been installed at the center of each bay. The arrangement allows visitors to circle them and see them from up close. I was fortunate to visit with a friend who has worked in steel fabrication and he called out the delicate bolts and solders that were holding the metal shards together, as well as the processes used to cut and color them. While at first glance the sculptures seem like giant tin foil balls, they’re actually exquisitely composed and have an overriding classical repose. They look most splendid from afar, and peering over the (precariously low) Guggenheim guardrail offers shifting, cinematic views of works across the way, works that you’ve just examined or expect to encounter soon. Mounted on the building’s canted floors and walls with concealed wires and angles, they have the sweetness and delicacy of hothouse blossoms.

May 14, 2012 by Nalina Moses

March 24, 2011 by Nalina Moses

John Chamberlain’s work has always struck me as gimmicky. He became famous in the 1960’s for making sculptures out of old car bodies, sculptures which seemed, at the time, perfectly in sync with movements in found art, process art and pop art. As years passed his work has come to feel decidedly minor.

But at a survey exhibit at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea his pieces seem, in their assured composition and assertive figural presence, almost classical. There aren’t any of the iconic crumpled-balls-of-fenders here. Instead there are large, freestanding sculptures, which have a bearish spirit. There are smaller objects resting on pedestals, like heads. And there are assemblies hung off the walls, which look like flayed skins. In the immense, bright gallery, the sculptures feel more substantial, and more vital, than they ever have.